The improbable coalition of birdwatchers, conservationists and heritage buffs trying to stop the road are testing the government’s promises of a new responsiveness, or, put another way, the strength of its conviction that it still knows best. The argument over the fate of the graveyard may look like a tussle over Singapore’s past. But it is really about its future.

The minimum core urban population that can qualify a city for an underground system is 3m people, but even a place that big may find the operating costs crippling. Mr Zhao says the systems in Harbin and Kunming are unnecessary.

In 2008, for example, a small asteroid was detected 20 hours before it hit Earth. The world’s astronomers scrambled, and its likely point of impact was calculated with what turned out to be reasonable accuracy. It blew up over the Nubian Desert, in Sudan, and no one was injured.

Some cars already have systems that assist with parking, but these are not completely autonomous. They can identify an empty parallel-parking space and steer into it while the driver uses the brake. The Volvo system, however, lets the driver get out and use a smartphone application to instruct the vehicle to park. The car then trundles off, manoeuvres into a parking place and sends a message to the driver to inform him where it is. The driver can collect the car in person or use his phone to call it back to where he dropped it off. Autonomous parking could thus be provided at places like shopping centres and airports, which are controlled areas in which automated vehicles can be managed more easily than on open highways.

Ford, for example, recently tested a brake light that can provide an early warning to other motorists. If the brakes are applied hard in an emergency, a signal is broadcast. This illuminates a warning light in the dashboard of suitably equipped following vehicles, even if they are out of sight around a bend or not immediately behind the vehicle doing the braking.

The ordinary-looking BMW 5-series models use a variety of self-contained guidance systems. These include cameras mounted on the upper windscreen, which can identify road markings, signs and various obstacles likely to be encountered on roads.

Germany has no official guardian of linguistic purity; the very idea of it would bring back unpleasant memories of the 1930s. France has two: the Académie Française and a separate committee, reporting directly to the prime minister, that monitors businesses and other organisations for neologisms, especially ones imported from English. Offenders are told to use papillon for flyer, tablette for iPad and vignette for widget.

Advertising in Germany is particularly prone to Anglicisms. “There is the illusion that using English shows you are livelier, younger and more modern,” says Holger Klatte of the German Language Association, founded in 1997 to preserve and promote Goethe’s mother-tongue. Zalando, an online clothes shop, is a typical offender with its “Must-haves”, “Basics” and “Shop by Style”. Deutsche Telekom’s slogans include the baffling “Call & Surf Comfort via Funk”.

Ironically, among the reasons for the worldwide success of Audi, a German carmaker, is its slick marketing, which even in English-speaking markets features a German slogan, Vorsprung durch Technik.

BBC Worldwide’s twin tasks are to help finance the BBC and to sell British intellectual property globally. It is the largest exporter of British content, and, outside Hollywood, the biggest distributor of taped programmes, according to Attentional, a media consultancy. As well as selling BBC programmes, including “Doctor Who” and “Top Gear”, to networks in other countries, it runs channels and distributes shows made by independent studios. Last year Worldwide contributed £216m ($333m) to the BBC, a record (see chart).

And Croatia’s hour has arrived: on July 1st it will become the 28th member of the European Union. The hour may even be approaching for the rest of the western Balkans. Serbia and Kosovo have struck a deal on the status of the Serb minority in the breakaway territory, and Serbia has been given a firm commitment that membership talks will start by next January. Kosovo will open talks on a “stabilisation and association agreement”, a first step. “Wow!” exclaims the European commissioner for enlargement, Stefan Fule. “Who would have thought this would be possible?”

Membership cannot mend everything. The process has not overcome the bitterness of Vukovar’s people. Nor is it certain to fix the Balkans’s many troubles. Yet it offers the best hope of promoting the rule of law and stability. Having failed the people of Yugoslavia in 1991, Europe must not shut the door now.

“It wasn’t cool to be Chinese or cool to be Asian,” he said. “The idea that the San Gabriel Valley could be the locus of some kind of cultural movement or identity is fascinating. They are asserting cultural capital to create Asian-American identity that wasn’t there before, and one that is homegrown, not imported from Taiwan or Hong Kong.”

Most visitors come to see Yakushima’s majestic cedar trees, which have so far been unaffected by the mysterious ailment killing the pines. The cedars won the island the distinction of a Unesco World Heritage site in 1993. The cedars were logged for centuries to build some of the great Buddhist temples in the ancient capital, Kyoto. The biggest remaining tree, the gnarled Jomon cedar, measures 16 feet around at the base and is estimated to be at least 2,600 years old.

“The worst is when winds blow from Beijing and Tianjin,” two Chinese cities about 900 miles to the northwest, said Mr. Nagafuchi, 62, who visits Yakushima once a month to collect the data readings. “This is proof that when such a big country industrializes, its effect will spread everywhere.”

The restaurant’s name, La Vie en Szechuan, is less a nod to Edith Piaf than a worldly sounding pitch to the moneyed Chinese who make their way to New York.

On a recent evening, a cheerfully bossy, bespectacled waiter interrupted a tentative order: “We have better duck. Not on the menu.” He lowered his voice. “Made with Budweiser.” The beer, it turned out, is added at the end of the braising, lending a pleasing sourness.

A dispatch in The New York Times in August 1944 described the view of Mont-St.-Michel that American soldiers saw, “racing their tanks across the Norman hills into Avranches.” Built “for war as well as worship,” the writer noted, the Mont “seems to float on the sea as gracefully as a ship under full sail, catching all the changing colors of the clouds.”

For casual visitors to Vietnam, surface evidence of economic progress may make it hard to understand the deep pessimism that many express in the country. Millions of people who a decade ago had only bicycles now speed around on motor scooters past factories and office towers.

“In a nutshell, Marx is a great thinker,” he said. “But if we never had Marx it would have been even better.”

The lack of supply is a reminder of how the consumption patterns of Chinese — and their rising food and environmental safety concerns — can have far-reaching impacts on critical daily goods around the world.

But few would have guessed that Netflix’s software expertise would extend to entertainment produced by top-flight actors, directors and writers. Beginning this year, Netflix streamed four original series —“House of Cards,”“Hemlock Grove,”“Arrested Development” and “Orange Is the New Black.” The shows earned generally good notices, kicked up

More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20.

“In a lot of foreign markets, people think that the Internet is Facebook,” said Clark Fredricksen, a vice president at eMarketer. Those users, Facebook hopes, will become more attractive to advertisers as their incomes grow and they gain broader access to the Web.

In a pork-loving patriarchal world where connections reign supreme, an overweight Muslim woman from a poor family in western China faces significant disadvantages. And she had no facility for numbers, business, not even the names of high-ranking officials. But, by the age of 29, she had already fought harder for our

turtles often cling to quaint Western notions like transparency, meritocracy and ethics, which puts them at a disadvantage in China’s hyper-Darwinian economy, where locals are more willing to do whatever the boss or client wants.

“If China wants to bring back the best, it needs a fundamental reform of its academic and scientific institutions” to break the power of politicised administrators over hiring and funding.

With the abundance of relatively low-priced farmed salmon, however, many of us succumb. But the flavor of farmed salmon doesn’t even compare. It’s like the difference between a free-range chicken and one that’s been factory raised.

Wild salmon swims long distances, its color a result of a natural diet of krill, plankton and algae. Farmed salmon languishes in pens, and its pink color comes artificially.

All that is needed to complete this salad is a green herb sauce: sauce verte in French. It’s basically a zippy vinaigrette with shallots, capers and a mixture of herbs, mostly parsley. Use chervil, too, if you can find it. It is similar to parsley but more delicate, with a

Call it liquid shiitake mushrooms. This dark, rich concentrate imported from Japan is ready to add to sauces or brush on meat, fish or vegetables, contributing a deep, mushroomy finish to the flavor. It’s also excellent to add to pasta, like a toss of cool soba with sautéed shiitakes. Use it sparingly; a little goes a long way: Mitoku Concentrated Shiitake Broth is $15 for 10 ounces at Bklyn Larder, 228 Flatbush Avenue (Bergen Street), Park Slope, Brooklyn; (718) 783-1250, bklynlarder.com.

“You hear about people who argued that they couldn’t help because it was wartime and they had their own family to worry about, but here was a man with a career, a wife and an incredible amount of children who certainly did do something for others,” Ms. Hartog said.

death of the present Dalai Lama might well be the beginning, not the end, of real problems in Tibet: freed from the constraint of the exiled leader’s personal authority and his insistence on a non-violent stance, a younger generation of angry Tibetans may turn aggressive.

But when he discovered credible evidence that the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, was a polygamist and that the Book of Mormon and other scriptures were rife with historical anomalies, Mr. Mattsson said he felt that the foundation on which he had built his life began to crumble.

If you married this woman, it would be positive for society. It would be transformative for her children, it would eliminate the possibility of her being taken advantage of by someone marrying her for financial gain and it would add a hardworking person to the American populace. I suppose some will argue it would unjustly place her in a position to take a job from a “more deserving” U.S. citizen, but I don’t believe mere citizenship entitles anyone to a job.

Trappes is a poor place in a wealthy department (Yvelines), made up of market towns and neat commuter suburbs. With a big Muslim population, it has a history of hard-line Salafist Islam, which has been watched by French intelligence for years. Yet Trappes is also the home town of three

A ban on the wearing of all “ostentatious” religious symbols, such as the Muslim headscarf, in public schools was passed with Socialist support in 2004. Many French Muslim women approved of the burqa ban, on the grounds that the covering has no tradition in the northern African countries with historic

Yet the Chinese still operate, more than the people of countries where trust is stronger, through networks of kin, hometown acquaintances and work colleagues. Outside such networks, people do not always see it as their responsibility to help strangers, however acute their need. China’s traumatic years under Mao Zedong only only reinforced the instinct. The Communist Party destroyed people’s relations with many institutions, including, sometimes, their own families. Speaking or acting in public for the sake of others at a time of political persecution might have deadly consequences. This has added to what Charles Stafford, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, calls an abiding “anxiety” about sticking your neck out for other people.

Radical monks, led by a notorious chauvinist, Wirathu, from a monastery in the northern city of Mandalay, have abandoned any claims to Buddhism as a universal doctrine of compassion and non-violence. For them Buddhism equates with a narrow nationalism. They argue, quite simply, that unless the majority-Buddhist population fights back, Muslims, with alarmingly high birth rates, will overrun the country. On July 22nd he claimed that a small explosion in a car near where he was preaching was the work of Islamic extremists. It all taps into old resentments against the big influx of Indians, many of them Muslim, who came into the country on the coat-tails of British colonialists during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They ran much of the country’s finance and commerce, and were hated for it by the indigenous Burmans. Race riots against Indians and Muslims in the 1930s in Yangon (then Rangoon, the capital) and elsewhere were whipped up then, as now, by a chauvinist Buddhist press.

They propose that Buddhist women must seek permission from local officials to marry a man of another faith; meanwhile, the husband-to-be should convert to Buddhism. Under Myanmar’s former military rule, such ideas had little chance of becoming law, but with the onset of democracy all that has changed.

They may have been inspired by an imprisoned radical cleric, Abu Bakar Basyir, who in April called for a jihad against Myanmar’s Buddhist population.

EasyJet flew 16.4m passengers in the three months to June, up 2.6% on last year. The budget airline’s revenue grew by 10.5% in the second quarter, to £1.14 billion ($1.75 billion), as frugal consumers snapped up cheap holiday flights well in advance.

They were trained and often expected to be on the ground for up to 21 days without a break, charging into fire with 40 pounds of gear on their backs. Using chainsaws and pickaxes, they were given the job of getting close to big fires, to dig deep trenches and clear the ground of dried branches and leaves, to try to keep the fire from spreading.

Mr. Obama chose an itinerary that was largely safe and heartwarming. His three-nation tour of sub-Saharan Africa, which ended Tuesday, avoided hot spots in favor of places where development is succeeding, investment is increasing and democracy is, in at least two of the cases, well established.

Chinese officials apparently think it is not enough these days to count on tales and parental admonitions to teach children the importance of filial piety, arguably the most treasured of traditional virtues in Chinese society.

Touch screens first made their way into military jets two decades ago, when Thales integrated the technology into the cockpit of the French Rafale fighter. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter being developed by Lockheed Martin will also have instrument panels with touch-screen interfaces. But the concept is still relatively new

As Kim put it:“When we were a developing country, we made our living through manufacture. Now we have to move on and live by the culture industry.” With a history going back 5,000 years there is a deep well to draw from.

The unparalleled beauty of the city. The ubiquitous and exquisite flower shops. Going everywhere on a bicycle — to work, to shop, out to dinner, to the movies. The ease of getting around Europe. Running on the soft paths of Luxembourg Gardens. The museums. The ballet. The American musicals at

The first cherry tomato I popped into my mouth in France was a revelation. Peaches are rich and velvety, chosen by the fruit sellers by feel and smell for the day you plan to eat it. Pour aujourd’hui ou demain? they ask. The soup man at the market on the